Last January I started writing down what happened at the bench each day. Not plans, not sketches, just an account after the fact: what I did, what went wrong, how long it took. Twelve notebooks later, the record says things I would never have said out loud.

The difficult part is never the difficult part

Before the notebooks, if you had asked me which stage of a chair takes longest, I would have said the joinery. It is the technical bit, the part that looks like skill, the part I would tell someone about at a dinner.

The notebooks disagree. Joinery is roughly a fifth of the hours. The largest single category, by a distance, is fitting and adjusting after everything is supposedly done. The second largest is waiting for glue and finish to cure, which I had somehow never counted as time at all.

You cannot manage the parts of your work you have never measured. You can only have opinions about them.

Mistakes cluster

Errors did not distribute themselves evenly. They arrived in groups, and the groups almost always followed either a late finish the night before or a day when I had changed the plan mid-session. Two causes, most of the damage. Neither has anything to do with technique.

Knowing that changed the workshop more than any new tool did. I stop earlier now. I write the plan down before I cut, and if I want to change it, I change it on paper first.

The notebook as a slow argument

What I did not expect was how much the record would argue with my memory. A month feels like a month of steady progress. The notebook shows four good days, eleven ordinary ones, and a week lost to a decision I had already made twice before.

That is uncomfortable reading, and it is the entire value. A notebook you enjoy reviewing is probably not telling you anything.

What I would do differently

Write less. My early entries run to a page and I stopped keeping them up by March. The ones that survived the year are three lines, written standing up before I turn the lights off. Short enough that there is no reason to skip it, which turns out to be the only quality that matters.